Google: Have Multinational Site Over TLDs? Use hreflang

Google's Pierre Far announced and clarified on Google+ that you should use the rel-alternate-hreflang for URLs that are multinational site spread across multiple top-level domains, even if they have the same languages.

The example he gave includes:

http://example.com/widget in English language for users worldwide

http://example.de/widget in German language for users in Germany

http://example.ch/widget in German language for users in Switzerland

He said most people feel they should not use the hreflang here but you should. He said "you can use rel-alternate-hreflang for these URLs."